Ex-Gay Watch

Proposition 8, the law that bans same-sex marriage in California, has been ruled unconstitutional by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The announcement, made just before 10am PT today, is another nail in the coffin of marriage inequality in the US. The fight for LGBT equality is still far from over, however. According to Andrew Gumbel in The Guardian (UK), the ruling “will not put an end to the argument about the rights of same-sex couples in the United States, but it will be a vital stepping stone toward the inevitable final showdown in the Supreme Court in Washington.”

Speaking as neither a resident nor a citizen of the US, I find it bizarre that a nation that makes so much of its commitment to freedom of expression should have such a problem granting so many of its citizens the right to make one of the most beautiful human expressions of all. Here’s to more victories in a battle whose final outcome I think we all, despite the pains and frustrations of the wait, can predict.

A feature-length film aims to tell the story of American teenagers sent to an evangelical Christian boarding school, Escuala Caribe, in the Dominican Republic. According to its website, the school is “therapeutic,” with a mission to help the parents of underachieving kids “train their child in the way he or she should go.”

Several past students allege “physical and emotional abuse” at the “boot camp,” however. Among those featured in the upcoming documentary Kidnapped for Christ are a teenager who says he was, essentially, abducted during the night to be taken from his US home to Escuala Caribe:

One morning I woke up. Two guys were at my house. … Both my parents were standing there, saying: “We love you, David. We love you.” … [The men] tied a belt around my waist, dragged me with the belt to their car. … I got sent down here because I am gay, and my parents, they just weren’t okay with that.

Watch the trailer below:

Escuala Caribe is run by New Horizon[s] Youth Ministry, which, according to its website, has recently been taken over by Lifeline Youth and Family Services, Inc.

Here’s a very telling paragraph from the school’s website:

Culture shock is a form of psychological disorientation produced by a sudden and complete change in one’s cultural environment. … [It tends] to make adolescents remarkably more dependent upon our Christian staff for direction and emotional support, while also rendering them more malleable and capable of new perspectives. Culture shock in a highly structured setting greatly enhances meaningful communication, offering young people extraordinary occasions for making enriching discoveries that inspire personal growth.

Hat-tip: Towleroad

Exodus International President Alan Chambers has published his reflections on what he said to a conference of gay Christians last month.

Speaking to the Gay Christian Network in January, Chambers enthusiastically greeted GCN leader Justin Lee as his “brother in Christ”:

I honestly trust [Justin Lee], and I honestly like him, and I honestly believe that he loves Jesus and that we are brothers in Christ and that we will spend eternity together … and because of that, the thing that brought me here first and foremost is: We’re Christians, all of us. We may have diverging viewpoints … but the thing that brings us together, the thing that causes us to even want to have this dialogue, or need to have this dialogue, is the fact that we all love Jesus. We all serve him. We serve the very same God and believe very different things.

Now Alan Chambers wants his constituents to know he wasn’t endorsing the faith of gay Christians. While he told Lee he viewed him as someone who loved Jesus and served him, he is now at pains to assure Exodus’s conservative evangelical Christian supporters he still regards gay Christians as sinful people who have turned their backs on Jesus:

As an adoptive father, my children are irrevocably mine.  They may disown me, stop talking to me and sin against me, but that does not change the fact that they are mine and always will be.  I believe the same is true of God with His adopted children.

Thus, I believe that people who sin (all of us) can be Christian if they have accepted that free gift of salvation. If someone ever knew Christ, they still do.

In other words, he doesn’t really believe gay Christians love Jesus and serve him, an impression he unmistakably intended to create at GCN. He believes they may have once been saved, and therefore, because of a theological loophole, they may still go to heaven. But essentially they’re wayward children who have disowned God, stopped talking to God and are sinning against God. He said one thing at the conference and another thing today.

As I pointed out immediately following the controversial GCN panel appearance, Chambers has a habit of doublespeak on this issue of gay Christians, as he did last year when he told the Oprah network he expected to see gays in heaven. It was obvious to me that he would have to do the same backpedalling after the GCN conference; it was only a matter of time.

He goes on to downplay his remarks that “99.9 percent of the people I know have not changed their sexual orientation.” He meant that “complete orientation change occurs very rarely” [emphasis mine].

I or one of my co-contributors will unpack more of these statements next week. For now, I’ll offer one more observation about what Alan Chambers did and didn’t say at the GCN conference, which some bloggers lauded as a sign of progress for Exodus. Chambers failed to take responsibility for Exodus International’s actions.

Asked about the message “Change is possible,” he claimed Exodus had always meant something more nuanced than America heard (it was a misunderstanding after all); asked about the dubious practices of Exodus member ministries, he protested he was unaware of any problems; confronted with the story of a gay teen coerced into treatment by an Exodus ministry, his first instinct was to question the integrity of the report. Pressed for an apology for his organization’s past promises of sexual orientation change, he said he was sorry Exodus had been “ambiguous.” His tired excuses were that “we serve a messy God,” and that Exodus hasn’t always been great at communication.

Things will start to change when people who wield such power over the lives of others accept full responsibility for the harm they cause and take concrete steps to undo the damage. Alan Chambers and Exodus International have yet to come close.

Anglican Mainstream has once again demonstrated its deep-rooted homophobia. The British-based organization teamed up with ex-gay group Core Issues to coach a disappointingly small audience on how to treat gays and lesbians — and it took the opportunity to deliver vile smears against the LGBT people it claimed to help.

According to Changing Attitude‘s report, American lawyer and pastor Jim Reynolds, came across the most gracious at The Lepers Among Us, the conference held in London last weekend. The level of compassion declined considerably when Anglican Mainstream’s Lisa Nolland took to the stage:

We were then treated to what can only be described as a lip-quivering and blazing-eyed rambling rant from Ms Nolland about the evils of sex education. She seemed set on outdoing all previous speakers in the smearing of the LGBT community. We had already heard about gays as paedophile child molesters, gays as threats to the family and marriage, gays as spreaders of disease.

But now Ms N was going for gold with her bitter denunciation of LGBT organisations, and especially the Terrence Higgins Trust, for producing perverted and obscene curriculum materials intended to corrupt the innocence of children. Apparently gay activists have conned their way into schools to tell kids that ‘eating faeces’ is great sexual fun (Lisa taught us to call this ‘scat’) and to teach them how to do ‘cock and ball torture’ really well (Lisa said we should refer to this as ‘kink’).

Ms Nolland is also an enthusiastic advocate of the spurious slippery slope argument: tolerate homosexuality and we will be engulfed by all manner of perversions and we will drown in vile pornography. She distributed several ‘information’ sheets including a list of the most popular acts advertised and depicted on the internet such as ‘double anal’ in which ‘a woman is penetrated anally by two men at the same time’, ‘multiple men ejaculating onto a woman’s face’, ‘a penis thrust so far down a woman’s throat that she gags’ etc etc.

Ms Nolland seems to be a world class scaremongerer, alarmist and demoniser. Her presentation was very ugly indeed. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. I suspect that even amongst her own constituency there was embarrassment about a lack of balance which appeared to border on pathological obsession.

Even conservative Anglican Peter Ould describes the damning account, which you can read in full here, as “sobering reading.”

As I have written before, Anglican Mainstream is anything but mainstream. By slandering gay men and women, and promoting myths and misconceptions about homosexuality, it proves itself hateful and homophobic.

A number of British conservative evangelical leaders have written to the Daily Telegraph to express their support for Lesley Pilkington, the Christian therapist found guilty of professional malpractice for offering a “gay cure” to an undercover journalist.

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is among the 70 signatories of the letter. Also joining him are the former Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali, the current Bishop of Chester the Right Reverend Peter Forster, the Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham — and several names representing the most extreme end of the anti-gay, ex-gay movement in the US. They include JONAH’s Arthur “Abba” Goldberg, PFOX’s Regina Griggs, and David Pickup, Jeffrey Satinover, Julie Hamilton and Benjamin Kaufman of NARTH.

To defend the practice of gay-to-straight reparative therapy, the signatories rattle off the names of Joseph Nicolosi, Dean Byrd, Robert Spitzer, and Jones and Yarhouse, apparently ignorant of just how limited – and sometimes outright misleading — the scope and results of such research have proved.

But Carey et al have also glossed over the reasons why Lesley Pilkington was banned from practising psychotherapy in the UK. That she offered to help journalist Patrick Chapman to change his sexual orientation is almost beside the point — she insisted, despite his denials, that the roots of his homosexuality were in low self-esteem, (non-existent) childhood sexual abuse and (also non-existent) a family history of freemasonry. Lesley Pilkington was guilty of sheer quackery.

It’s no surprise that Lisa Nolland and Chris Sugden of the ultra-homophobic Anglican Mainstream would support Pilkington. But that leading Church of England evangelicals such as Lord Carey and Bishop Michael Nazir Ali would not only support her but throw their weight behind the anti-gay pseudoscience of NARTH is indefensible.

[Edited to reflect the fact that Michael Nazir-Ali is the former Bishop of Rochester.]

A conference taking place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, today offers ways for conservative Christian churches to minister to “the lepers among us” — namely, gays and lesbians, or those who “struggle with same-sex sins.”

Astonishingly, Core Issues, which organized it and an identical conference taking place in London, England, tomorrow [correction: next week], failed to foresee the offence the “leper” label would cause.

A press release issued yesterday said:

The conference organisers recognise that the event’s title “The Lepers Among Us” has caused some misunderstanding, being taken as a call for the church to treat LGBT people in the way that lepers were treated by society in biblical times – shunned and regarded as untouchable. In fact the intention is the opposite. This conference criticises the church for behaving in this very way – treating LGBT people as “outcasts” – and calls upon it to help end prejudice wherever it is found, especially within the church.

So what can we expect of a conference organized by Core Issues? Their dubious choice of speakers in the past, including Lesley Pilkington, David Pickup and Arthur “Abba” Goldberg, of JONAH, shows a strong identification with the type of anti-gay, ex-gay conservatism promoted by NARTH in the US.

Core Issues Trust’s claim that it does not offer conversion therapy is somewhat disingenuous, for while it doesn’t directly offer therapy at all, it clearly stands for the NARTH approach. The homepage currently links directly to an article by David Pickup promoting “authentic reparative therapy” and decrying Exodus International for rejecting it. To support its claim that gay orientation is unnatural, the Core Issues website links approvingly to a PFOX article labelling homosexuality a “public health crisis” and citing the discredited “gays die at 41″ claim. The science section of its websites offers links to articles by Neil Whitehead and Jeffrey Satinover, both of NARTH. The latter is a Core Issues board member.

Core Issues promotes a “compassionate” approach to the “same-sex attracted,” but ultimately its message to gay Christians is that they need healing, and it is clear that by “healing,” they mean healing NARTH-style:

There is a growing body of research evidence indicating that sexual preference is neither immutable, innate nor chosen. As a consequence of our basic sinfulness we all have desires that we do not choose to have but we do have choices with respect to what we do about them. As a consequence our sexual identity can be reinforced or altered by either gender-affirming or gay-affirming lifestyles or therapies. CORE works with people who voluntarily seek to change from a “gay” lifestyle to a gender-affirming one. This is sometimes referred to as a “sexual re-orientation” process.

Merely abstaining from homosexual activity, although admirable, cannot be regarded as healing. Heterosexual preference is the goal of gender-affirming therapy and this may lead to marriage. However there will always be those who choose to remain celibate and single. Such singleness should be valued and respected.

Justin Lee, the director of the Gay Christian Network, has published an official statement concerning the unscheduled appearance of Exodus President Alan Chambers’s at the GCN conference in Orlando, FL, last week. Read this initial post and the ensuing comments thread, as well as this follow-up thread, for the backstory. Justin has given Ex-Gay Watch permission to reproduce his apology here in full:

Official Statement from Justin Lee

By now, many of you have heard about a public meeting I had last weekend with Alan Chambers, the president of the world’s largest ex-gay ministry.

The meeting generated a lot of controversy for a lot of different reasons. That controversy, in turn, spawned a lot of rumors.

Among the rumors I’ve heard:

• That I invited Alan Chambers to be a surprise speaker at the GCN conference.
• That GCN has softened our stance against ex-gay ministries in the name of “bridge building” or “reconciliation.”
• That the GCN conference team and I planned an ex-gay event with no regard for the safety of ex-gay survivors.

None of these are true.

There are, however, reasonable and fair concerns being expressed about what happened, and I believe it’s important for me to acknowledge and apologize for the mistakes I made throughout this process. But it’s also important for you to know that I would never do some of the things I’ve been accused of.

So before I explain the mistakes I made, I want to put the rumors to rest by explaining exactly what happened and why. Then I want to talk about where I screwed up, and what I’m going to do to make it right. Read more…

Exodus International President Alan Chambers is happy to affirm LGBT Christians as his brothers and sisters in Christ, at least according to his opening gambit at the GCN conference last week:

I honestly trust [GCN leader Justin Lee], and I honestly like him, and I honestly believe that he loves Jesus and that we are brothers in Christ and that we will spend eternity together … and because of that, the thing that brought me here first and foremost is: We’re Christians, all of us. We may have diverging viewpoints … but the thing that brings us together, the thing that causes us to even want to have this dialogue, or need to have this dialogue, is the fact that we all love Jesus. We all serve him. We serve the very same God and believe very different things.

He received applause for the comments. Yet in an interview with Christian radio host Janet Mefferd only the day before, Chambers failed to challenge a series of remarks that characterized gays and lesbians as people in darkness, who don’t know God and belong to a community at emnity with the community of God.

First, Mefferd said:

One of the things the LGBT world does not understand, simply because they don’t know the Lord, is, as you said, we all struggle with sin, we all struggle with temptations to varying degrees, but when you know Christ, and when you are a new creation in Christ, what changes in you is the “want to.” All of a sudden you go from loving sin, embracing sin of all kinds, to not loving it. … This is, I think, a hard thing to communicate to the people who are just still in darkness. [Emphasis mine]

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

While a little over 24 hours later Chambers told the GCN conference he believed they did know the Lord, he allowed Mefferd’s offensive statements to go unchallenged. She later said:

You’ve been on both sides. You’ve been a part of the homosexual community, and then you’ve been delivered over to the kingdom of God as a Christian and now have left that lifestyle behind.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Again, Chambers failed to challenge the assumption that “gays” and “Christians” are two opposed, mutually exclusive communities and that you must be “delivered” from one to join the other. On the contrary, he played into the assumption by recounting how, six years after he “left the homosexual lifestyle,” he looked at a group of gay men and realized, “I’m not one of them any more.”

Playing to both sides on this issue of gay Christians is not new for Exodus International. In March last year, Chambers enthusiastically affirmed the existence of gay Christians in an interview with the Oprah network’s Lisa Ling, only to water down his statements when challenged by his conservative evangelical constituents. What is new is that some gay Christians are now taking him at his word.

The audio clips above contain Mefferd’s remarks with Chambers’s responses, to give some context, but you can listen to the entire interview here (starting at about 20 minutes in).

“It Gets Better” is a realistic message for gay and lesbian people living in the western world, where society is increasingly accepting of sexual diversity. But in some non-western parts of the globe, survival as an LGBT person is all but impossible.

Wendy Gritter of New Direction, Canada, has filmed a message for those gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning young people for whom the message of the It Gets Better campaign isn’t realistic or helpful. That’s not to denigrate the campaign, which Wendy has supported. It is to say this:

We want to say to those who are coming to [freetobeme.com] from areas which are not gay-positive — in fact, that are in very anti-gay contexts, where this is not a conversation, where there is much discrimination and prejudice, and perhaps violence, and perhaps danger — what we want to say to you is: Be wise, be careful, but know inside your own self who you really are, and that you are cherished, you are valuable and you are loved. And know that your voice matters. There are LGBT advocates all through the world, who are working very hard for the human rights of all people, including those who are sexual minorities. Maybe someday you can add your voice to that community saying, “If we diminish anyone’s rights, we are all diminished.”

Watch the video below:

The message comes via New Direction’s Free to Be Me website, which Wendy says has experienced increased traffic from non-western countries.

We’re a few days behind, but better late than never in wishing long-time Ex-Gay Watch friend and ally Wayne Besen, of Truth Wins Out, the very best with his new husband, Jamie Brundage. The happy couple married in Burlington, Vermont, on December 8.

Congratulations!